BuggBlog

Speaking of resumes

Over at my favorite right-wing, blood-pressure raising site, The Corner, a post on Va. Gov. Tim Kaine's possible ascension to the Obama ticket:

A friend writes, from Virginia.

...a child born on the day Tim Kaine took office would still not be ready for nursery school....What a partnership Obama and Tim would make. A dreamer - and a doer.

Okay, fine. And a child born the day George W. Bush took office would have greater intellectual skills and moral fiber than the current gang of idiots running the country from Pennsylvania Ave.

Hyperbole -- anyone can do it!

Of course, it is The Corner, where if a liberal so much as farts in the general direction of a cathedral or an evangelical theocrat then Kathryn Jean Lopez comes down with a case of the vapors, but when a right-wing nutjob shoots up a gay-affirming church then...crickets.

Jesus, take the volley

On Saturday, I went out to a local park with Cavin and our friend Robin to hit some balls -- mostly just to get in some practice, much needed since my most recent tournament flame-out. As walked to some empty courts on the far side of the park, I noticed that one of the men playing on the nearby courts was looking at us -- at me -- intently as we passed. Years of habit naturally made me wonder if I was being that openly cruised on a Saturday afternoon in a Virginia public park. I would have considered that an ego boosting perk.

When we got the entrance to the empty court, the man came up to the chain-link fence at the end of his court and asked us, "Are you here for the mixer?"

Oh, well, I wasn't being cruised, then -- pretty unlikely that there would be a big gay tennis mixer going on. We all shook our heads and said we were just coming by to hit.

"Would you like an invite?" he asked.

And that's the point where I got confused. He asked a few times if we wanted to be invited, which just didn't make sense to me -- was he inviting us to play with them or to join their group? There were about eight or so people set up around the picnic tables and on the court, obviously set up for a social afternoon. But what kind of social wasn't clear. Finally, after some flustered head-nodding from me, we all just said "Thanks" and went off to our own court to hit.

A bit later, as I was getting ready to serve, I saw the group had gathered underneath a tree at the end of the court. Everyone bowed their heads as the man was speaking -- reading aloud, I realized, from the book of Isiah.

Oh, well, that explains that.

Going all the way back to my youthful church-going days, I've never liked the passive, bait-and-switch approach to witnessing: Come play and have fun with us! Ulterior motives? Of course not! We just want to have fun and share our picnic with you! Here, have some Kool-Aid. How's that hot dog? Need some more mustard? We have plenty! Oh, by the way, have I mentioned that Jesus is worried about the state of your immortal soul?

It's not like I would have said "Sure!" if the man had been straight up and asked if we wanted to play some tennis with his church-group mixer. But at least it wouldn't have been so dang awkward.

Incidentally, you can tell my religious upbringing still lurks below my surface from the way that I instinctively used "dang" in that last sentence, rather than my usual "goddamn" or "fucking." So, Jesus, mission accomplished. For now.

No rain on our parade

No more tennis thanks to the rain, but here we are at Nellie's making the most of the evening. Tennis queens rule!

Oh, Mother Natire, you joker*

So here we are hiding from the rain. Cavin and Robbie are giving a big wet hello. Waiting to see if we get back for more tennis, or if the whole gay crew is decamping to Nellie's.

*Okay, fine, you try to type an error-free headline on an iPhone whilst juggling a Blue Moon and the phone and simultaneously try to avoid being pushed back out into the Ark-deserving deluge just outside the tent. I meant Nature. And I'm still annoyed with her, even though the evening was perfectly enjoyable, if rather damp.

Live from Kastle Stadium

Luckily for the magazine I'm a writer not a photographer. But here's an almost live pick I my new favorite Kastles player, Scott Ouedsma. He's better looking in person. Plays well too, of course.

Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?

And so then Cavin and I were walking out of tonight's World Team Tennis match -- Washington Kastles v. Delaware Smash, Kastles lost -- and being that I hadn't eaten dinner before heading downtown and it was now 9:30 p.m. I lobbied hard for stopping by Capital City Brewery, based primarily on the fact that the establishment sits directly across the street from the Kastles Stadium -- mini-stadium, actually, or perhaps a stadiumette -- and required only about 30 feet of walking effort for me to ensconce my posterior in a soft, pleathery booth, which was a glutteal relief after two-and-a-half hours on a slab of wood.

Cavin entered Cap City first, and I held the door for a woman of a certain age who was on her way out, and from the tobacco-scent wafting off her light blue top, presumably to smoke. She stopped directly in the middle of the door, blocking my path and waving an unlit cigarette in her right hand like a third-rate Bette Davis.

"You're not gay, are you?" she rasped.

"Um, yeah, I am."

"Gawd, every man I meet here is gay."

Yeah, well, I'm bettin' some of 'em weren't gay until they met you, honey.

The government's always the last to know

A supermajority of Americans believes that gays and lesbians should be allowed to served in the military, yet Democrats who control Capitol Hill continue to act as if doing something positive about gay people in the armed forces spells instant electoral death.

Can a few more people up there grow a spine now?

Re-Kindled

With a few weeks of experience under my belt, I can say I'm now an official e-book convert. I'm not giving up my addiction to print, but I'm scaling it back a bit. I made my first bookstore run in weeks last night, and while I picked up a couple things -- notably Natsuo Kirino's Real World -- mostly I looked at books and thought, "I wonder if I can get that on my Kindle?"

About the only motto I have in life is, "Always bring a book," so the ability to take a small library with me wherever I go has been wonderful, even better than I expected from my first days of experience with the Kindle. But where it's come in surprisingly handy is the gym.

You see, while I may have been easily seduced by the lure of electronic books, I have never enjoyed audiobooks. Hate them, in fact. I just find them so passive and unengaging, like listening to badly written radio plays -- it's a shoehorning of one artform into another format in the name of convenience, and it just doesn't work for me.

So listening to audiobooks at the gym (or anywhere) has been a nonstarter for me. But reading my Kindle while on the elliptical trainer works perfectly -- no fumbling with turning pages, no awkward attempts to keep pages from turning themselves, the ability to switch instantly to another book if the current selection isn't doing it for me.

Yeah, I'm the kind of person who's reading four or five books at a time -- I almost always have something that suits my mood at the moment. It's probably a bit of a bad habit, but at this age I'm not inclined to do anything about it.

So the Kindle is my new gym buddy, way more entertaining and useful than watching tv shows on my iPhone. Now if Amazon could just do something about the fugly nature of the thing....

One more thing on McCain and adoption

Whenever I'm around a large group of my in-laws, I'm inevitably asked if Cavin and I are going to adopt a child. While they're all accepting of me and Cavin, I don't consider my in-laws to be a big bastion of liberalism. I saw plenty of reelection signs for Bush during the last election cycle, during which I also remember listening to a heated conversation in Vietnamese where the only two words I caught were "Kerry" and "communist."

But like most Americans, on the day-to-day aspects of life and family they're open and supportive. So it makes you wonder what the hell is up with John McCain.

The more I consider McCain's attempt to walk back from his anti-gay-adoption stance without actually walking back from it, the more perturbed I get. Basically, he's pushing the idea that gay parents are inferior, unwelcome, and to be discouraged but okay as a case of last resort. In other words, we're there to take care of the kids the straight don't or won't take care of.

I can't find my copy of the book at the moment for an exact quote, but Dan Savage touched on an aspect of this issue in the story of his adoption, The Kid -- basically that he realized he didn't want to be the noble gay man taking on the damaged and discarded children of the world. He wanted a family, the same as heterosexual couples hope and wish for healthy, "normal" children -- and there's nothing wrong or selfish about that.

I should be really clear here that people who take in those children who face terrible odds, for whatever the cause, are people who should be admired and honored because, while it obviously has its rewards, it also has challenges that I think most people couldn't handle. But those people are both straight and gay; their commitment comes from their humanity, not their sexuality.

But the whole issue is pretty much McCain in a nutshell. The more attention you pay to the man and his policies, the ickier he gets.

McCain on gay adoption: It's better than shooting orphans in the head

Andrew Sullivan posts a "clarification" from the John McCain campaign on his NYT interview where he voiced his opposition to adoption of children by the homosexuals.

"However, as an adoptive father himself, McCain believes children deserve loving and caring home environments, and he recognizes that there are many abandoned children who have yet to find homes.  McCain believes that in those situations that caring parental figures are better for the child than the alternative."

So, an adopted child with stable, employed and loving gay parents is better off than he would be in the gutter, but not as well off as he would be living in a trailer park with unemployed, unstable and disinterested heterosexual parents.

Just, you know, for the sake of comparison.